Day in and day out we see spiritual leaders dole out divine messages on our television sets. It appears that humans are physical beings having a spiritual experience. It is actually quite the reverse. Most of us who seek to be completely in sync with our spiritual self try to break beyond the shackles of our physical being i.e. getting out of our bodies. What we really should be doing is getting fully into our bodies. This is especially true for women. The energy of the divine feminine form has ingrained itself in our minds by the abundance of literature on divine feminine deities. In recent times novels like The Da Vinci Code and Divine Feminine have brought out the powers and magnitude of femininity. On a personal level, divine feminine is our unique and highest expression of embodied feminine energy in our world. It is the full flowering of our feminine gifts…gifts of love, life and inner knowing.

At the risk of being labelled as clichéd, I would say that the greatest blessing of a woman is the power of giving birth. Bringing into the world a nascent life, untouched by either virtue or vice, and offering it to nature to fondle and cherish and bless is the greatest consecration a human can hope for. And women have this in plentitude. A woman’s role does not finish with the act of giving birth itself. She is the nourisher, the care-giver and source of eternal support for the child. Is it any surprise that the first words of many a child, sometimes even without the help of prompts, is ‘Mama’? A mother goes through the worst of growing up pangs in a child that cannot be expected of one who has not been endowed with the same experience of motherhood. It is this power of giving birth and power of enduring that merits a mother the rightful comparison with Mother Earth. In contemporary contexts, the soft emotions of love and all-encompassing endurance of motherhood have come to acquire a negative connotation implying a woman’s passive role in society and culture. It seems to imply that a woman’s role is limited to playing the part of a wife and mother. The word ‘feminism’ has come to acquire notoriety. Women’s empowerment is the force to reckon with today. But amidst all the dust generated by progressive thoughts, we must not let the fruits of womanhood be grimed. Walking shoulder to shoulder with men need not come with the liability of having to let go of womanly attributes.

Science has indeed made our lives simpler. And it has made simple events like birth complex. Now the biological clock can be frozen in time and brought to life according to one’s convenience. The warm pre-cursor to a human being, an ovum can be frozen in labs for fertilization at a later time. The explanation to our cringing grandmothers is that today’s woman is as busy as a man making her fortunes up the corporate ladder. But whereas a man has the luxury of having a family hand in hand with his climb above, a woman has to put certain chapters of her life on hold. Since the biological clock may run out of batteries in the quest, a helping hand from science does not seem all that off league. The shortfalls of the procedures may have not raised their heads yet, and I hope there are none, but it does bring to notice one pleasant fact. Even the progressive woman of today, brought up with an awareness of Wollstonecraft and Simone de Beauvoir, has not given up on the concept of motherhood. On a panoramic view, it may appear that a microscopic community of progressive women seems to look at motherhood as another feather in the cap as proof to the patriarchal world that they have it in them to juggle, without dropping, a career with a nuclear family home front. If done keeping in mind the resources at hand and with grit, it can be touted as the greatest achievement of women. But if it is a half-hearted attempt to silence chauvinist critics, it may very well take on the forms of disasters so rampant in society today. There comes a time in every girl’s life when she starts needing her mother more than her anyone else around her. And if the mother is not able to scoop out time out of her corporate calendar for her, it may result in emotional blockage in the adolescent’s mind. Now it has got the stamp of approval from psychologists and social scientists alike that the outlook of a man on women has its atavistic source in the image his mother projects before him. Not necessarily Mamma’s boys, but every man needs a strong mother’s presence in his formative years to dispel any myths the society might harbour in his psyche.

Celebrate motherhood! Not just as a balancing act with the important career aspect, but as a gift from God which only a woman can lead to fruition.